After finishing my PhD in particle physics I decided to direct the focus of my research toward code development and found an opportunity via a fusion related DOE funded SciDAC project. Since 2014 I have been working on Xolotl, an open source spatially dependent cluster dynamics simulation code predicting the evolution of the divertor material under irradiation in a Tokamak device. More recently, Xolotl has been extended to model uranium dioxide nuclear fuel in fission reactors. The advantage of the cluster dynamics technique is to allow for experimentally relevant simulations, by integrating parameters and processes obtained in more physically realistic simulations like MD or DFT that are computationally too expensive. In the future I hope to continue to extend Xolotl by modeling additional materials (iron, alloys, etc.) and implementing more physical processes in the code.
